The fantastic thing about being a journalist is that it offers you a great opportunity to make a difference.

Sadly, however, as a business journalist you tend to find that such opportunities are rather more limited than those of your peers who are reporting from the front line in war zones or investigating abuses in care homes.

Those opportunities do still come to business journalists, as Robert Peston will attest, but on a day-to-day basis you don’t usually feel that you are rocking the world as a result of the work you do.

That’s why I was so delighted that EY asked me to be involved in its Women³. The Power of Three forum, part of its Women. Fast forward platform, which aims to speed up the rate at which gender parity will be achieved in the workplace.

The forum has brought together leaders from corporate, entrepreneurial and government organizations from across Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa to find practical ways of achieving gender parity sooner.

This week, it launched its initial white paper – Who holds the key to closing the skills gap? – at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. I am very proud to say that I wrote the white paper with the team at EY.

I began working on the project in the early days and have been privileged to meet a number of very inspiring and dedicated women and men as a result of my involvement in it. These individuals – who were both from within EY and a wide range of external organisations – have really opened my eyes to the huge challenges that women face in the workplace today. As a woman, I obviously did have an appreciation of the issues involved beforehand, but I now realise that the problem is far worse than I had previously comprehended.

So what have I learned?

I have learned that while women theoretically enter the workforce on an equal footing with men in many countries, they immediately face barriers to progression.

Hiring managers often demonstrate unconscious bias when placing young women in roles. Also, women themselves make career choices in anticipation of the fact that they may want to have a family later on – because they believe that compromising on their career is the only way they will be able to achieve both.

Furthermore, there is a sad dearth of senior female role models in many organisations around the globe, which unfortunately gives young women the message that it is extremely difficult to reach the top.

Women who are in the middle stages of their career must often balance a wide range or responsibilities, both inside and outside the workplace. Unfortunately, however, most workplaces are still structured in a way that makes it difficult for them to balance those responsibilities.

Working hours can be rigid and some types of organisations are still defined by their macho “long hours” cultures. Childcare can be expensive and if travel costs are also taken into account, it may not be financially viable for a woman to work.

Finally, policies that are intended to help women in the workplace are often not properly monitored or enforced. Plenty of organisations like to claim that they are supportive of women, but just how supportive are they in practice? There can be a big gap between the PR spiel and the reality.

The biggest eye-opener for me in the whole project, however, was the terrible situation facing experienced women in the workplace. Women make up half the world’s population and we are all getting older every day. Yet there is an appalling lack of women aged 45 or over in senior roles and in visible roles (eg in the media). It seems that we just disappear off a career cliff once our childbearing years are behind us.

This is an extraordinary waste of talent and experience. Older women have a huge amount to contribute to the workplace – there is nothing like raising a family to hone your negotiation and time management skills, for example – and in an age of skills shortages, why are we allowing them to simply vanish?

Research by the McKinsey Global Institute has found that if women played an identical role in labour markets to men, as much as $28 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2025. That’s an increase of 26%!

The fact of the matter is that gender inequality comes at a cost to us all. In the foreword to EY’s white paper, Laura Liswood, secretary general of the Council of Women World Leaders, says: “The economic empowerment of women is absolutely critical to business innovation and productivity, poverty eradication, the formation of progressive social policies and the creation of a world that is richer in every sense.”

Exactly.

I really hope that the work done by EY, including the white paper that I helped to write, will start to break down the career barriers that hinder women in all parts of the world – for the sake of everyone who is alive today and everyone in the generations to come.

As a journalist, it’s hard to imagine making a bigger difference than that.

Click here to read: Who holds the key to closing the skills gap?

Sally Percy is a freelance journalist and managing director of Love Letters Publishing, a specialised content agency for financial services businesses. http://www.loveletterspublishing.co.uk

Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, has been quoted as saying: “I could never have got to where I am in my career without my husband. The choices I made, he worked around.”

Her words will resound with many professional women and they certainly echoed the words of the female panellists I heard at a Women in Treasury forum hosted by Treasury Today.

That event – along with other events for women in finance that I have attended over the years – inspired me to put together this article on the five essential accessories required by women who want to reach the top of the finance profession.

Accessory #1 – A house husband

Some truly incredible women manage to get by without one, but the truth is that behind every successful woman, there is usually a supportive man who is prepared to stay in the shadows while his partner searches out the limelight. Not only that, but he is brave enough to face the crowd of mothers waiting outside the school gates day after day and explain that being the primary carer really is his full-time job. Not every man can do it.

Accessory #2 – A supportive boss

These are possibly even harder to find than a supportive husband so if you already have one, you are one of the lucky few. If you don’t have one, you need to seriously think about trying to find one. Apparently men who have daughters tend to be strong supporters of women in the workplace. What you need is a boss who appreciates that you are not a threat. Instead, when you do well, you are making him/her look good.

Accessory #3 – A mentor

Sometimes nothing quite beats being able to seek out the wisdom of someone who has “been there, done that”! That’s why a mentor is an invaluable accessory for any ambitious woman in finance who is aiming for the top. If you have a mentor, you have the opportunity to discuss your own career, along with important business issues, with someone who has a wealth of experience and a fresh perspective.

Accessory #4 – Black high heels

When I was editor of Accountancy magazine, I was once criticised for putting a pair of black high-heeled court shoes on the front cover to represent women in finance. Now, I have been to a lot of industry events over the years and I can honestly say that black high-heeled court shoes are not only commonplace – they are virtually de rigeur. I have two pairs myself. I would not think about attending a finance event unless I was wearing them. I’m not sure I can give any logical reason as to why, except that they mean I’m closer in height to the men whom I’m talking to!

Accessory #5 – Self-confidence

This is the accessory that many women in a wide range of fields notoriously lack. But it is the essential accessory to getting ahead in your career. If you’re not naturally self-confident, you need to invest in your own personal development so that you become more self-confident – perhaps by doing life coaching or training in personal speaking. Either that, or you need to learn to be a very good bluffer!

Small and medium-sized businesses in the UK are owed £67.4bn in unpaid invoices, according to the Asset Based Finance Association (ABFA).

That’s up 8% from £62.5bn last year and 36% from £49.5bn in 2011.

Previous research from the ABFA revealed that SMEs are waiting an average of 72 days for invoice payment, up from 61 days in 2009.

It seems that despite the economic upturn, businesses are actually getting worse – not better – about paying other businesses. Is that right? No. Is that fair? No. So why is this allowed to happen?

Partly I blame the recession for encouraging businesses to string out making payments for as long as possible in order to boost their own cash flow. I can see the logic to that, but the problem is that if we all adopt this strategy, what happens? Ultimately, we all end up waiting longer to get paid.

As the owner of a small business myself, late payments are something that I care passionately about. And I think I’ve come up with a very simple solution to the problem:

All businesses – large and small – should settle their bills with one another within 15 days (unless there is a genuine cause for dispute) or face a (very big) financial penalty.

There are three big benefits to this as far as I can see:

1. The cash flow of the entire UK business community would improve dramatically, sparking economic growth. If businesses could feel confident that they would be paid within 15 days, they could plan better and react more quickly to opportunities. They are also less likely to need to borrow money.
2. It would save a lot of time and money. Chasing unpaid invoices is costly in terms of both time and money. Just think what business owners could do with that time and money if they could channel it into other areas of their business.
3. It would cement relationships. Unsurprisingly, businesses tend to like working with businesses that pay them on time – funny that! When a business pays on time, its supplier is more likely to see it as a valued customer, which means that it should enjoy a higher standard of service than its competitors.

As far as I can see, the business case for paying within 15 days is overwhelming. So it would be great to see some large, well-known companies that claim to embrace sustainability adopt this approach. In doing this, they would be enhancing the sustainability of their supply chain and setting a good example to the business community as a whole.